Philip Hartman’s No Picnic is a priceless artifact of New York’s pre-gentrification East Village, with appearances by Steve Buscemi, Richard Hell, Luis Guzmán, and other fixtures of the Downtown music and art scenes. The winds of change were in the air during the film’s production in the summer of 1985 as Hartman raced to capture his neighborhood in all its squalid glory. Hartman’s neo-noir comedy follows down-and-out jukebox operator Macabee Cohn, played with deadpan melancholy by David Brisbin, who wanders the cheap tenements, dive bars, and derelict streets of the Lower East Side in search of a mysterious woman in a striped dress.
Featuring a host of Bard College graduates, No Picnic was written and directed by Phil Hartman ’79, and won Best Cinematography Award at Sundance in 1987 for Bard professor the late Peter Hutton. Bardians involved include Andy Aaron ’76, Tim Allen ’84, Martha Atwell ’85, Margaret DeWys, Sharon Garbe ’83, Leon Hartman ’08, Manon Hutton-DeWys ’06, Josefa Mulaire ’79, Paul Marcus ’76, Jeff Preiss ’79, Rebecca Quaytman ’83, Emily Rubin ’78, Lewis Schaffer ’79, Andy Zimmerman ’82. The film is being distributed by Jake Perlin ’98.
“A forgotten eighties NYC movie is back, scuzzier and better than ever. A chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era – of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking. No Picnic captures New York’s boho hipster Lower East Side on the edge of Reagan-era gentrification – and a new restoration just saved it from obscurity.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone
“… One movie about the East Village that gets it right… A swan song to a languishing New York tribe.” – Manohla Dargis, Village Voice
